Okay, so I have finished making my first ever electric guitar from scratch (apart from the neck which I got from a cheap Behringer which I bought from MikeM – didn’t want to spend too much money on a project which I may never have got off the ground.)
As mentioned in the first post, apart from an orbital sander and a drill, I didn’t use any other power tools. Why? Because I didn’t have any is the short answer.
It was an eventful build, and a long one too, but now that I know that I can make a working guitar, I will buy better wood, use proper tools and ultimately get a better guitar. But for the time being I am really happy with the new addition to my collection and am seriously proud that I was able to do it.
Shaping the Firebird without a jigsaw was tough – it took lots of sawing and sanding, and with pine being quite brittle, there are a few areas where chunks of the guitar came off when sawing which fell in my ‘shape’ of the guitar. I used a product called Quick Fix if I remember correctly to fill these areas (and also where I had originally drilled the hole for the pickup selector switch) – its a kind of putty which hardens to the consistency and density of wood which can be sanded, painted, drilled through etc – you can see it in places on the pics, the small grey/brown areas.
The cutaway below the neck was seriously hard to shape and you’ll see that its not nice and round like a real firebird... again, the right tools would have helped.
The biggest mistake I made was cutting the body before I had a neck... bad, bad... this left me with not enough wood to play with to create the neck pocket, and almost stopped me in my tracks. I turned to the Quick Fix and ‘extended’ the neck part of the body with that, and so far so good. Talking about the neck... with the body being a mere 30mm thick, the neck screws would have been too long and might have come through the fingerboard. Lucky for me I couldn’t screw them all the way through for some reason, no matter how hard I tried!
When I had the basic shape of the guitar I chiselled out the recesses for the pickups, the control plate and the neck. Not the easiest, especially when knots were involved, but after a while I got the hang of it and was able to get some nice spaces cut (and its quite therapeutic sitting with a beer, listening to some tunes and hitting a chisel with a mallet!)
The biggest problem for me was the wiring... how to get the wires from both pickup cavities to the control plate cavity and, hardest of all, the pickup selector switch. Luckily, with Alan’s help, I was able to bypass the selector switch headache by soldering directly to the pots and now control each pickup with its own volume pot.
I thought that was my problem solved, but it wasn’t. I managed to get a channel between the two pickup cavities by screwing a long screw into the sides of the cavities, from both ends, and meeting in the middle. It wasn’t easy to get the wires through, but after about 20 minutes of struggling, the wires from the neck pickup were in the bridge pickup’s cavity. Getting the wires from the two pickups through the longer channel between the pup cavity and the control plate cavity, which I made in the same way, was impossible. I tried for half a day. There was no way I was going to get it through.
The only solution was to drill holes through the two cavities, chisel out a bit of the cavity and cover it with the trusty Quick Fix. This I will repair as the ‘putty’ sticks out too much, so I need to take it all out, cut a deeper channel, fill and sand. There was also one spot on the back where I went through the wood when chiselling that I need to fix up better, but I was itching to test out the guitar so I had to string it up!
Finishing was done with Danish Oil in Natural – really happy with that – and then a few layers of Antique Wax. I also enjoyed the finishing process, and come to think of it, sanding was also enjoyable.
So after what seems like an age (I think I started this project towards the end of June, but life, work, an expecting wife, a toddler, an impending move all got in the way), I started the final assembly and wiring on Saturday. Apart from finding that the finish of my bridge had been badly scratched somehow, probably from my chisels, all went to plan and I went to bed on Saturday night with just the strings to put on. Sunday morning with an empty house and I did just that...
First impressions? The bridge is slightly off and will need to be moved a millimetre or two to the right (looking at the guitar from above). It doesn’t impact the playing too much (unless I want to do hectic bends on the top E string at the 14th fret), but it will just make it play that little bit better. The action is a lot higher than I am used to, and because of the neck assembly, that is the way it will have to stay.
Otherwise its a very comfortable guitar to play, pretty light and the pickup selection with the knobs works fine for me.
